No Physical Evidence

His young daughter dead of a heart defect, his beautiful wife gone, his career at the Sacramento DA's office on the rocks, Joshua Jin--the hero of this wooden thriller--has lost nearly everything. All that's left is the one case dumped on his desk, the Chinatown rape of a 13-year-old Anglo girl named Rachel, who refuses to talk or to provide physical evidence of her assault. Jin realizes the case is a loser, just a way for the DA to send a Chinese-American lawman into Chinatown right before an election, but he refuses to drop it, despite suspiciously vehement orders from upstairs. Rachel's rape evokes too many memories of his beloved daughter; besides, counsel for the suspect is Stacy August, his dangerously gorgeous ex-girlfriend. Former deputy DA Lee (Tiger's Tail) has concocted a rich premise here, mixing together Chinese life and American legal practice, political realities and private grief. He obviously knows his way around a courtroom: Jin's efforts to select, then romance, the jury read like a primer on trial practice. But the labored plot is slow to develop, and, when it does, Lee provides constant recaps, underestimating the reader's ability to follow the action. His stock characters (one foul-mouthed detective with a heart of gold, one computer-geek law intern, one femme fatale, etc.) talk and think in notably awkward noir-ese (""I tried not to like her too much, but her words were bread crumbs to a deeper sense of self""). The resolution, implicating far too many characters on both sides of the law, goes down like a two-ton wonton. BOMC alternate. (Sept.)